The Year of the Runaways (4 page)

Rain pattered against the glass. He turned his head towards Tochi. Yesterday, Tochi had moved his mattress out from under the window and turned it at a right angle, so he and Randeep now lay parallel to each other, the door at their feet. Randeep guessed it was so he could sleep facing the wall. His boots were crossed at the ankles and were the only part of him that poked out from under the blanket. Randeep’s blanket. Which he’d not even been thanked for.

‘Bhaji, are you awake?’

Nothing.

‘Bhaji?’

‘What?’

Randeep didn’t know what. He hadn’t had a conversation planned. ‘I can’t sleep.’ Then, a minute or so later, ‘This is strange, isn’t it?’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘I mean, when you were a kid, did you ever think you’d be working in Sheffield, in England, and living in a house like this? I’d never even heard of Sheffield.’ There was silence and Randeep asked, ‘Do you still have people back home?’

Tochi didn’t reply. The rain seemed to be plashing harder and Randeep drew his blanket up around his neck.

‘Bhaji?’

‘What?’

‘I like hearing the rain outside.’

A pause, and then Tochi: ‘Me too.’

2.
TOCHI: AUTORIDER

Tarlochan Kumar was bent double under the last huge sack of fodder. He shook it into the buffalo trough and moved away as the animals nosed hungrily forward. He was seventeen; it was his fourth year in Panjab, his third with this family. He’d miss the place.

He crouched by the pump at the side of his hut and washed his arms, soaping off the grass and sweat. Then he changed into a clean white kurta pyjama he’d that morning left to dry on a branch. As he made his way to the big house, the sunset streaked the horizon.

The solid iron double gate was closed and its blue rivets still hot to touch. Inside, in the courtyard, his sahib sat cross-legged on his menjha, speaking to a local usurer. The sahib’s wife was napping beside him, her head flopped back over the love seat, and on the floor their daughter crushed herbs in a small ceramic mortar. Once the usurer was dismissed, Tochi knocked on the metal gate and was invited in.

‘How many times?’ the sahib said. ‘Treat this place like your home.’ He was in a good mood, which was something.

‘Sorry, sahib,’ Tochi said.

He noticed the wife half open her eyes and tap her foot twice against her daughter’s back. The girl lifted her chunni up over her head, screening her face from Tochi.

‘I have to go home, sahib. My papa is not well. I got a call yesterday.’

His sahib uncrossed his legs so just his toes touched the floor. The taut hairy ropes of the menjha had striped deep red marks over his feet. He watched them fade. ‘It’s the height of the season. You could not have picked a worse time.’

‘I know.’

‘Why are you chamaars so unreliable?’

Tochi said nothing.

‘How ill is he? Will he not get better?’

‘Both his arms are gone.’

The wife clucked her tongue in sympathy and muttered a waheguru.

‘What colours God shows us,’ his sahib said. ‘You understand I’ll have to get someone else. I can’t keep your job for you.’

‘I know.’

Tochi nodded, turned to leave.

‘Don’t forget your food,’ the memsahib said.

He thanked her and picked up the thali of leftovers on his way out.

The next day, his sahib was waiting outside the big gate, wages in hand. Tochi accepted the wad and bent to touch the man’s feet.

He walked the two hours to Jalandhar, his belongings in a brown rice-sack slung across his shoulder. At the depot the buses were parked up in their rows, the iron grilles blurring into each other in the mellowing dark. He found his bus, but the conductor sitting on the roof ground out his beedi and said they wouldn’t be leaving until it was full, nine o’clock, at least, so he should pass his luggage up to guarantee his place. Tochi kept his bag with him and went and sat in the station’s chai-samosa dhaba. He ordered some tea and made a cradle of his arms on the table, nestling his head down and closing his eyes.

It was past noon before the conductor blew his whistle. As they laboured out of the compound, the passengers were rocked from side to side and the man sitting next to Tochi clanged the tiny cymbals tied to his wrists and whispered a prayer under his breath. He was a young man, in a cheap white cotton shirt and faded black trousers. A burgundy folder lay across his lap. He was going for an interview, he said. To be a ground clerk. Tochi nodded as if he knew what that was and told the man he was going home because his father had lost both his arms. Grimacing, the man clanged his cymbals and didn’t speak again, as though he didn’t want Tochi’s bad luck to rub off on him.

The conductor steadied himself against the pole while he punched Tochi’s fare into his machine, tearing him off a stub from the tape-roll of pink chits. Then, rice-sack clasped against his stomach, Tochi allowed himself to swing in and out of sleep until it was gone midnight and they were pulling into Meerut station and the young man next to him was saying he wanted to get past.

Outside the depot, tall double-headed lampposts ran up the spine of the road, and traffic swarmed, though no one seemed to be getting anywhere fast. The connecting bus wasn’t leaving until the morning, so Tochi dodged across the road and carried on down the street, hoping to find a hostel amongst the cement stores and Airtel operators. In a two-storey shack with red and green fairy lights all over:
‘AARTI HOTEL’,
he paid the boy watching a Bollywood film at the counter. Then he went up to a thin metal bed and fell asleep to the snicker of cockroaches.

He couldn’t get on the coach direct to Patna – other passengers priced him off – so he waited the morning out under a narrow tree, making a cola and two rotis last until he climbed onto the afternoon bus to Shahjahanpur. He played cards with a young boy sporting a sandalwood mark on his forehead. The boy was sitting across the aisle from Tochi and they used their knees for a table, but when the boy asked Tochi his name – ‘No, your full name’ – and Tochi told him, the boy’s mother made some excuse and switched places with her son.

He spent three nights in Shahjahanpur, sleeping on the ground behind a mandir, head on his sack of clothes. On the fourth morning he asked the pandit for a bucket of water. He washed himself, then dipped his clothes into the bucket, wrung out the water and put them straight back on. He could almost feel them crisp and shrink against his skin. He went again to the station, and this time the conductor said there were enough passengers for the journey, but only as far as Allahabad. The bus was full of Sikh women, pilgrims with round turbans and small knives. No one said a thing the entire journey, and Tochi sat at the back, staring out at the young green corn. He wondered how they’d coped in the year since his father’s accident. All his brother had said was that money was running out, work drying up. To come home, please.

Dawn arrived grainy in Allahabad and Tochi joined the long queue for the Patna bus, his fourth. He’d got to perhaps six or seven from the front when the conductor announced they were full and everyone would have to wait for the evening ride. Tochi went down the windows each side saying that his father had lost both his arms and would someone please exchange tickets with him. Most passengers turned their heads, but a young man with a professorial look jumped off and cheerfully told Tochi to take his place. He even offered to pay for his ticket but this Tochi politely declined.

Slowly the heat dwindled. When the bus crawled into Patna, finally there were landmarks Tochi recognized: Vaishali Talkies, Bhavya Emporium, Market Chowk. He stepped off and bent to touch his hand to the soil and then to his forehead. For the final hour-long journey he flagged a packed bumblebee-painted auto-rickshaw and hung onto the side of it, feeling his body curve as the thing juddered out of the city. Tochi jumped off at his village gate, opposite Bicky’s Friendship Store, and as he passed under the arch he again bent to bless himself with dirt from the ground.

He walked the long white strip of road, past some kids playing with a stick who stopped to watch him. The vast field of wheat either side was still in the hot air. Butterflies flew reed to reed, wide-winged, cabbage-green and peacock-spotted. He turned off into an alley where the sewage moved in sluggish plates in front of the wooden doorways. It was darker here. He came to a red panel, the paint flaking to reveal the green underneath, and he lifted it aside and ducked and turned sideways to squeeze himself through the thin gap and into the room. The sun streamed through holes bored into the back wall and fell like scattered treasure across one half of the stone floor. On the other side, in thick shade, he could see his father asleep on a mattress woven from coconut leaves. His head was turned to the wall and the sleeve of his grey tunic lay empty at his side. The pink shelf his sister had put up was still there but the things on it were new to him: a gold pen, a ration card, an address book still in its plastic wrapping, a picture of a white girl with straw-coloured hair hugging a dog in front of a thatched cottage. There was an English inscription on the picture of which he only knew the word ‘home’. He dumped his clothes in the corner and went back outside. Further up, the lane forked and at the junction was a large broken fountain now filled with sand. Beyond it were a few shops made from sleeves of tin that seemed to be held together by nothing more than God’s benevolence. The tailor – Kishen – was still there, cross-legged at the sewing machine, under a ceiling fan which made the sheets of fabric displayed behind him ripple. They’d gone to school together, briefly, back when the state had attempted a literacy drive. They shook hands.

‘Your brother said you were coming back.’

‘How’s business?’

‘Running. Papa died last year.’

Tochi swatted a fly hovering by his ear. ‘Is there work?’

Kishen said there was nothing. ‘Even Chetan and his sons went to Danapur. They heard there was land there.’ He measured out some tiger-print cloth, looped it back and sliced it in two with scissors tucked beneath his thigh. ‘They came back. Nothing.’

Tochi looked at the pyramids of hot yellow bricks, at the two rat-thin dogs weaving primly between the wheels of an oxen cart. Some bare-chested kids played cricket in the arid field, and beyond them was a mountain of sewage, looming like a black cliff face. Nothing seemed to have changed.

He shook hands with the people he passed, confirming that he was back and that he had found work in Panjab. And, yes, hadn’t he grown? He walked slowly, wanting them all to get a good look at him, to understand that there was once again a man in the house, that it wasn’t just the cripple. The villagers understood this. They would have done the same.

When he had completed his circuit and arrived back at the sand-filled fountain he saw his brother coming down the road. Dalbir. His brown shorts were tattered and his white school shirt not much better. He carried a sack of grain about twice his size. So they had taken him out of school. Tochi approached but Dalbir shrugged him off: ‘I can carry it.’

‘Never said you couldn’t.’

Dalbir was looking to the ground. His eyes were wet.

‘I didn’t bring you anything back. I’m sorry. I said I would, but I didn’t.’

‘That was four years ago,’ Dalbir said. ‘I’m fourteen now.’

Tochi stepped aside and watched his brother turn into the field, where brown buffalo were feeding. In the house, his mother was unpacking his clothes, shaking them out and hanging them on a thin wire she’d tied across the back wall.

‘Geckos will climb in if you leave them on the floor like that.’ The gold wedding hoop in her nose glinted in the daydark.

Tochi crouched beside the door. He took off his boots and placed them against the wall. He heard his father shuffling and turned to see him wriggle upright, using his shoulder-stumps as a kind of motor. There was a glass of whisky on an upturned bucket level with his face and he laboured to catch the straw in his mouth. When he finished he breathed out gratefully. ‘Why’d you tell him? What good is he here?’

‘Was he drunk when it happened?’ Tochi asked.

His mother moved to the mud oven, squatting. ‘He thought he’d switched the machine off.’

‘When can you go back?’ his father said, slurred. ‘You need to go back and work.’

‘We need a man in the house,’ his mother answered. ‘I can’t even get a proper rate for the milk any more.’

Dalbir stepped under the doorway – he still didn’t need to duck – and slid down the wall opposite his brother, copying his pose: crouched on his backside, knees pitched up and arms draped loosely over the top. Palms cupped. And then Palvinder, their sister, arrived, her salwaar covered in cuttings from the crops she was helping pull up. She touched Tochi’s forearm as she passed and joined her mother in the corner of the room, and both women started blowing into the cave of the mud oven in an effort to get the cooking-fire going.

The dhal was thin and barely covered the shallow plate, the potatoes few. Tochi tore his second roti in two and threw half across to his brother. His sister passed round glasses of hot tea, the side of each glass stamped with a cartoon mouse. Tochi blew across the rim of his glass, while his mother and sister used the ends of their chunnis as gloves. Afterwards they rolled out the wicker mats and Dalbir went and lay beside his father. Palvinder shook her mat out by the back wall, furthest from the door, and Tochi was to sleep across the entranceway, in case of intruders. His mother pulled her chunni over her head, hiding her face, and said she was going to check on Devi Bai down the lane, because her son was off looking for work and the daughter-in-law wasn’t behaving as a daughter-in-law should. Tochi listened to the starry rustle of her clothes as she stepped away.

‘What d’you have?’ his father asked. His eyes seemed redder through the dark.

‘Is there none left?’

‘Did you not save any?’

‘I sent it all to you.’

His father sighed and turned his face to the wall. Tochi stood and went outside, jumping the fat river of sewage that ran in front of their home. The night sky shone so bright it made silver splashes in the drains. He could hear drills somewhere. He heard his mother returning, too, coming through the night like a nearhand ghost. She stopped beside him. She looked older than he remembered. The hair thinner. Still that overbite which had passed on to her daughter but not her sons.